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Comment by jval43 | Hacker News Reader

With all their employees and machine learning people Netflix couldn't find a single data scientist to present this in a nicer way?

All we get is an Excel sheet dump with a huge list, not even grouped by series? Not to mention regions, languages, genres, some graphs, etc.

I'm a bit surprised to be honest.

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Funny, I was going to comment how refreshing it is to see a raw Excel data dump instead of insights tortured to whatever agenda by a data science team. Regions and genres would be nice though.

I wonder if this data dump is a consequence of the recent SAG and WGA agreements. A large part of their fight was about Netflix opening up the numbers. I was under the impression that it was to be done privately, but maybe they have to release this publicly and a lot more data privately to the Guilds.

They published the data. You are free to use whatever JS library of your choice to do that. Then you can come back and post a Show HN, then someone else can comeback with their Show HN of how it was rewritten in Rust/Go/Lisp just for the lulz.

Hell, it's tuesday, so by monday, I expect a "did it in a weekend" SaaS allowing uploads of boring raw excel data and receive a nice UI for the mere exchange of them a permanent and irrevocable license to use the data for any purpose commercial or not.

> uploads of boring raw excel data and receive a nice UI

https://datasette.io/

Have you never seen netflix' recommendations? That must tell you how much they care about customer facing data.

This isn't a marketing effort, it's a press release for Hollywood insiders.

The only thing I'd really like to see them add is just a column for how many hours each thing is, so you could tell how many "watches" this vaguely converts to. Of course you could look that up but, a lot of looking up to do there.

Based on my experience, I would imagine some management type grabbed the reins and claimed that the engineers just don't know how to present information! And then of course he proceeded to make the message worse and less clear.

If they did put it into a slick data visualization, people would say "this is marketing, just give me the raw numbers". This is better because if we wait 2 minutes, someone will make a visualization of it anyway.

Really, I came to say I really appreciated having just the data to play with.

Would have been nice to have a few more columns though. Country of origin, number of episodes and play time. etc.

And was it just me or did the formatting cause massive lag in LibreOffice Calc, had to convert it to CSV first to make it usable

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